16 April 2025

"CT scans could cause 5% of cancers, study finds". Whoa. When I read that I had to check out the article. The operational word is "could" and if you look at the actual article, they didn't do a longitudinal case-control study, but rather, used the RadRAT model that estimates what the cancer incidence would be. It's a model, and so it could be wrong. Not to panic, as the article commenter said. If you are recommended to get the CT scan, you should get the CT scan. Doctors should continue to be cautious about how many scans they order.

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A caffeine metabolite, 1-methylxanthine (1-MX) has been shown to improve memory and lead to "increases in key brain chemicals linked to learning, neuroprotection, and antioxidant defenses".  Sign me up! I already drink coffee, and I do feel like it has some beneficial brain effect. The original study was done in male albino rats, so it's not clear how much of my perceived benefit is just wishful thinking.

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Conservative Americans are more likely to distrust science. Gee, I wonder why?

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Japan's population keeps decreasing. The drop is a record. Few are interested in having kids in Japan. Marriage rates are low. A lot of young Japanese would rather spend money on crap like gacha. Sounds like an unhealthy society, which is a shame. C'mon, Japanese men and women – get off your oshidi and start making babies!

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A great way to trash Wikipedia's reputation even more. Harvard activists stage a giant Wikipedia edit session, to make them look less bad, and replace antisemitic attributions with innocent-sounding pro-Palestinian goodness. This is why Wikipedia alternatives exist. You would think Wikipedia would care about their online reputation, but I guess not. This is another example of the scability law. Wikipedia was great when it was still small and every editor aspired to quality. When you open it up to the world, it becomes crappy.

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This video is going around. The United States has gotten out of shape in terms of manufacturing, and can't do basic stuff anymore. How far we've fallen. If there's a need for military escalation, I fear for the country. We won't be able to make things as we did during WW II. 

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Don't fall for this Google Gmail scam. It's amazing that Google won't fix it, or admit that it's a problem.

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Oregon legislators are set on getting that kicker money, especially since they won't be getting as much federal dollars. But Oregon has the money – they just want to keep wasting it on illegals and the homeless.
Washington is looking to raise taxes, too. Gotta feed that always-hungry Democrat machine.

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Well, well. Legacy Hospitals are actually financially healthy and don't need OHSU's rescuing after all. Wasn't that the reason for the merger? 

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...people who overestimate their political knowledge are more likely to react negatively during online conversations with those who hold opposing views—and as a result, become more emotionally polarized over time. The researchers found that this “overconfidence effect” helps explain why cross-cutting discussions, or exchanges between people with different political views, often fail to reduce hostility between political groups and may even backfire.

...the Dunning-Kruger effect was clearly present in the political domain. Participants who scored the lowest on objective political knowledge tended to believe they were more knowledgeable than average. In contrast, those who performed well were more likely to underestimate their knowledge. This misalignment between actual and perceived knowledge helped identify who was politically overconfident.

Rather than reflecting an honest effort to engage, such exchanges may become battlegrounds for self-affirmation, particularly among those who falsely believe they have superior political knowledge. When people feel certain they are right, they may become less willing to listen and more inclined to attack, reinforcing existing divisions.
I knew it!

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Those elderly who use devices such as cell phones are less likely to be demented. It's probably not cause and effect. I think that if you're not demented, you're more likely to figure out how to use your smart phone.

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I like Microsoft's Kermit font. It's a better Comic Sans.

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“There’s no money to repay anyone”. What a mess. The Ritz Carlton hotel project is so symbolic of Portland. A monument to the city's failure. So what will it become – a giant homeless shelter? 

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15 April 2025

Happy Tax Payment Day!  It's a good day to be reminded of how much Oregon has wasted your tax money.

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Really? According the US News & World Report, the John A Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu is a Tier 1 school in primary care, beating a lof of the bigger names. Am I reading this right? Better than UCLA or Dartmouth? How did that happen?

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I'm confused. First Trump announced that he's giving smartphones and chips a break from his tariffs. Then he says that there are no exemptions after all.  You would think that Apple would try to shift production to the U.S., but no, it's shifting production to Thailand, while it squeezes what it can from India and Vietnam. What's the deal, Tim Cook? Even NVIDIA is opening up production in Arizona.

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Speaking of chips, Intel has found a buyer for the Altera division. Man, FPGA chips were supposed to be one of the promising directions for AI processing, and in better days, Intel would be developing this tech themselves. Now, they're having to sell parts for the money.

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U of O's Institute for Policy Research and Engagement School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management says that Oregon is going to see more businesses fleeing the state due to the unfavorable business climate. Oregon needs to figure out how to retain businesses, but I guess that's not one of Tina Kotek's priorities, is it? Meanwhile, there's the infamous Khanh Pham, who now has the idea that big tech companies like Google and Meta should pay for local journalism.  At least $122 million apiece each year, she says. What a joke.  And all because AI doesn't refer back to the news sites as much as before. Get a clue, Khanh. Google is well-aware that AI is changing the business model, and they're afraid that it's not bringing in as much revenue to them as well. I guess every blue state has their own AOC.

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Democrat solutions to Democrat problems. I wasn't aware that if you're overdosing on fentanyl and someone calls for medical assistance, "the person calling for emergency medical assistance — as well as the person overdosing — will not be arrested or prosecuted for drug possession". It's called the Good Samaritan Law. 
Man, this wasn't the Good Samaritan parable I remember reading, where the Samaritan supplies illegal drugs to someone, and then when that person gets close to death, calls for help. I guess Oregon legislators read a different biblical translation. Laws like these are why Oregon has so many druggies.

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Bidaya AI is noticing some weird behavior with Gemini 2.5 Pro. Seems it doesn't use LLM tools. But from the screenshots, I can't tell if the problem is with Gemini or Google's AI Studio.

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14 April 2025

Why AI Is Better than Doctors at the Most Human Part of Medicine. Is AI really more empathetic than human doctors? Not really. They can mimic an emphathetic human, but this is only during the chat session. Once the chat closes, the model has no memory. Who are you, again? Don't be fooled.

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A nucleus in the brainstem has been found to have functionality it wasn't known to have before. It's the red nucleus, and it coordinates motor function planning, and responding to rewards. Something called salience. We're still discovering things about the human body.

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Heh. Trump is going to issue an EO that will force states to buy new voting machines or else manually count the ballots. Yes! It's time we got rid of the flawed, leaky, compromised Dominion voting machines, and use machines that are verifiable and can't be easily hacked. Great move, and will ensure that elections are trustworthy. Of course, this will cost money and the Blue states are screaming. This will force them to abandon spending money on illegals. This is important.

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Why Mozilla is failing. They really should not be paying their CEO that much money, and use it to build a better browser, like people think the money is being used for. I'm still using LibreWolf.

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Too many adults are clueless on how to be adults, and need to take classes. How in the world did this happen? Are adults so infantilized today?  From their protesting and online commentary, you would think that they sure got it all figured out. Are we talking about the same people?

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Another article touting the benefits of universal basic income. First of all, these were Germans. Not applicable to the United States, where much of that money would probably be misspent. Second, these article always don't follow-up long enough. Sure, everyone is happy in the beginning. But follow them long enough, and see if you've just bred a new dependency class. UBI is another non-scalable concept – good in the small, limited, and controlled setting, but not applicable to general society. All they can conclude is that it worked for them. That's it.

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Anthropic and OpenAI are now free to embrace freedom of speech, now that Biden is no longer in power. No more pledges to "avoid bias and discrimination", which generally was code for silencing anyone who criticized CRT and transgender ideology. Let the people judge.

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Half the men in Seattle are never-married singles, census data shows.  How sad. The commenters are eager to pass on advice like, get off the computer, or go to dance class, etc. The real reason is that young men have been trained to think they are just creepy perverts who need to stop bothering modern women. And modern women of dating age in Seattle are more likely than ever to be very far-left. This is the sign of a culture in decline.

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Do you dare ditch your iPhone case?  I'd still use a case, especially as the new iPhones will be aluminum instead of titanium. The metal will be softer.

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How to choose a modular synth. When I was young, I dreamed of owning a large modular synth. But now, I am a plug-in guy, and use DAWs. Recreating a patch would be so onerous, for one thing. And so the music that comes out of modular synths tends to be just ambient stuff, repeating things over and over. If you like that sort of thing. But the rest of us would like to create a different kind of music, with more complexity and variability, and less mechanical and automated sounding.

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Blue Origin's brief space venture has return safely.  Nice publicity for Bezos, since SpaceX has been getting nearly all of the media exposure recently. But the real celebrity, to me, is Amanda Nguyen.  Wow, why is she not more famous?

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A Dutch neurologist, Bas Bloem, thinks that Parkinson's disease stems from pesticides, specifically paraquat. It may be one cause, but probably not the only one.

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This article says that dementia is more common in married men than unmarried men. The author is "living single" – think she might be biased against marriage?  Anyway, it always pays to read the research article directly. What you'll find is that the study population is from people who signed up for a dementia study with the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center.
First, the study used data from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center (NACC), one of the largest cohorts with annual clinical evaluation of dementia over one of the longest follow-ups (up to 18 years). The NACC is an ongoing longitudinal study that has enrolled > 50,000 participants, with some up to 19 annual visits. Referral-based or volunteer participants were recruited from > 42 ADRC across the United States. Since 2005, the Uniform Data Set (UDS) has been collected annually (within a ± 6-month window) using a standardized protocol for all participants by trained clinicians or clinic staff. 
Doesn't sound like a random person in the U.S. How were these people identified for participation? Did they have relatives with Alzheimer's dementia? If so, there may be other factors going on. Interestingly, the Psychology Today writer doesn't mention this. Instead, she attributes the dementia risk to single people being better able to maintain social ties. C'mon.....

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Adipose tissue has an epigenetic memory for obesity. Once you become obese, there are epigenetic changes that produce transcriptional differences that don't resolve after weight loss. This promotes rebound obesity. The authors identified 4 histone modifications seen in adipose tissue of obese patients, which they suspect drives the change. I wonder how long it takes to be obese for these changes to occur.

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Time to use Uber?  Lyft now records the conversations you have in the car while you're riding. What a world we live in today.

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Here's a disturbing article. OpenAI's rise has felt very dot-commish to me, and apparently others feel so, too. How will OpenAI become profitable? Is this why Nadella has been a bit distant with OpenAI recently? If the company goes down, the impact will be felt by Microsoft, Softbank, NVIDIA, and Oracle. Coreweave is a minor player, and much like the empty Chinese datacenters rusting away that no one uses, it will probably just be written off.

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13 April 2025

Why are we seeing more plane crashes these days? A former airline pilot explains.

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What do you think of the new urinal designs?

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The way COVID-19 was handled made a lot of people not trust their physician. And it seems to have followed political lines. I, too, lost respect for doctors who heavily advocated for the mRNA vax and did not promote anything else. Also those who advocated putting non-compliant people in camps and taking away their liberties. And those who promote unnecessary genital mutilation, pretending that it's somehow of benefit.

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Some changes are afoot in the EU that could change the VPN world. EU leaders are getting to be more like China, it seems. Not good.

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12 April 2025

This bright high school student used advanced data analytics techniques and deep learning to discover 1.5 million deep sky objects, previously unknown.  What surprises me is that no one had considered doing this before. I guess there is a first time.

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This is a handy list of the companies with the largest market cap. Lots of basic info at your fingertips.

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If you're a Joe Rogan fan, this excerpt is important. Joe likes people to consider his podcast as a regular guy who is just seeking answers, but Douglas Murray brings up an important point. You have to know about the guests you select. Just inviting anyone who has a loud opinion on social media is potentially inviting the spread of flawed opinions, i.e. ones not based on informed or researched hypothesis. Joe has interviewed some flakes and that doesn't help his listeners. Dave Smith can sound smart but often it's just confidence. He's not to be trusted for information.

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Not healthy. 80% of Oregonians kept Medicaid benefits after pandemic protections expired. What the hell, man. We're over COVID now. These things weren't meant to be permanent. And pandemic relief for schools. C'mon guys, this is 2025. COVID is a mild cold now.
And here's the incompetent Seattle mayor, now realizing that cutbacks are necessary because the city forecast the budget so poorly. And Jeff Bezos has sold his house and has essentially cut off all ties to Seattle. Some of the commenters are saying that he didn't leave because of taxes, but it was to be near his family. Such idiots.
And why are federal grants supporting humanites in Washington and Oregon, like the Historic Trust? This is a state entity and should be funded by the state. Not the federal government, which has no business funding stuff like this.

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Speaking of COVID, have you noticed that a lot of teachers aren't showing up at school anymore? What's going on, and why doesn't the administration want to talk about it? 

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The Vacheron Constantin is a very complex watch.  Not bad for a $21,000 watch.

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I can't the FDA is fast-tracking a self-replicating mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 that will force your body to make spike protein forever and ever.  It's called the replicon shot, and I wouldn't volunteer to get this shot if they paid me a million bucks.

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11 April 2025

WalletHub's ranking of tax burden by state.  Oregon is #20. Washington is #28. And Hawaii is #1.

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The neutrino's maximum theoretical mass has been reduced by nearly half to just 045 eV.  This is due to the results from the KATRIN experiments.

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I covered mitochondrial transplants, but apparently some athletes are already doping with this. What? How do you do this? And if it's that easy, why hasn't it been done before?

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Has Einstein's dream of a unified field theory been realized? These people say yes.

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You can't even trust real time videos anymore. AI can make things not appear while the video is being captured. You can't believe anything anymore.

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I knew it. Google couldn't resist. When kids use Google Chromebooks, their data gets taken by Google. California parents are suing.
Google embeds hidden "tracking" technologies to follow students' online activity across the internet as they use websites and apps, creating a "fingerprint" specific to each child, the lawsuit alleged.
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A new fluoroquinoline-based antibiotic, Jun13296, a novel PLpro inhibitor, has anti-inflammatory properties and also activity against SARS-CoV2.

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Tom Sellers is stepping down as director of the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. Lisa Coussens is now interim director, but OHSU is now run entirely by interim people. What competent person would want to move in and take the helm at OHSU now?  Their reputation is destroyed. Now their leadership is just a bunch of nobodies.  Phil Knight's dream is gone after ten years.

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Wealthy retirees are fleeing Oregon. Isn't that what the liberals wanted? No more rich people? Well, wish granted.

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10 April 2025

Chewing a special gum might be able to suppress infection from herpesvirus and some influenza A strains:

A chewing gum made from lablab beans, Lablab purpureus—that naturally contain an antiviral trap protein (FRIL)—to neutralize two herpes simplex viruses (HSV-1 and HSV-2) and two influenza A strains (H1N1 and H3N2). The chewing gum formulation allowed for effective and consistent release of FRIL at sites of viral infection.

Spiffy.

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Newly-discovered Comet Swan is visible with binoculars now. It's in Pegasus and it doesn't look like it's going to be a great comet. Oh well.

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Multnomah County is facing a budget problem. So what do they do? Cut the Homeless Services Department, which pays for tents, tarps and other supplies that nonprofits then distribute to homeless people? Cut services to illegal migrants? No, they tell the district attorney to cut his staff.  Yup, cut services that help the people who pay taxes that support the city. Doom Loop.

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Oregon pays people not to work during the summer. Yeah, it didn't make sense to me, either.

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They admit it! Why isn't Oregon fighting back against the Trump administration cuts to Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program money? Because they realized that the programs that were funded weren't doing anything helpful anyway, and would be difficult to defend. Points for being honest, anyway.

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ChatGPT now has the ability to reference ALL your past conversations.Could be handy. Could be creepy.

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Elite athletes have another way they could make money – selling their feces.  Apparently, it's got some good stuff in it.

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Google might be back on the AI winning track. Yeah, I've played around with Google's Gemini-2.5-Pro and it's really good.  I like it, actually.

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Apparently the Nissan Leaf can be hacked. Hackers can take over your car, listen to conversations, see where you've been, etc.

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Cannabis smoking can effect long-term epigenetic changes in genes related to aging and cancer. But you didn't really care about those things anyway, right?

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Yikes. The UK is creating a precrime murder-prediction tool, to determine who is most likely to kill. What a dystopian country the UK has become.

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9 April 2025

Oregon Tier1 retirees are still enjoying ridiculous benefits. Isn't it so Oregon that the Oregon Supreme Court judges wouldn't allow it to be shut down, and they themselves enjoy its benefits? How is that not a conflict of interest?

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The Ritz-Carlton hotel building is "underwater". Investing in Portland was never a good idea at the time. It's even worse now.

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Two nutrition items:
Tumors like fructose that has been metabolized by the liver. The liver has ketohexokinase-C (KHK-C), and tumors like fructose metabolites produced by this enzyme.

Omega-6 fatty acids promote growth of triple-negative breast cancers. Linoleic acid promotes their growth.

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Wow, Microsoft was briefly the world's most valuable company again. Sic transit gloria mundi.  They used to be, but not anymore – Steve Ballmer took care of that.

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Dr. Mehmet Oz likes AI Healthcare.  AI technology is not ready for this.

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8 April 2025

Big development in legal circles yesterday: the death of district judges putting a nationwide hold on presidential EOs. No more "Hawaii judges". This never made sense, and I'm glad it's now clarified and on the books.

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A Cleveland Clinic study suggests that getting this year's flu vaccine might increase your risk of getting it. I wish that they checked whether people who got the vax developed antibodies, and whether they were IgG1 or IgG4.

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Why Trump's tariff policy makes sense. In historical context, it makes sense. The status quo is not acceptable to the U.S.

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Wow, five million "voters" were cleared from voter rolls. The mainstream news wouldn't report this, of course.

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Because of federal funding cuts, Oregon is eliminating math and literacy programs. Rather than eliminate services for non-citizens. It shows where the priorities are. They've got money for this, but choose to spend it foolishly.

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North Korean tech workers are struggling to get jobs at American tech companies, but there's an easy way to identify them. 😁

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Hmmm. Why people struggle with computers. It's not just the lack of training.

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Science's big problem is not a loss of trust, it's a loss of influence.Well, they blew it with Fauci and COVID, and they're still blowing it big time with gender crap.

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7 April 2025

Lasso peptides may be a new class of antibiotics.  Lariocidin B is a member of this class, and binds to ribosomes, much like other antibiotics we already have, like macrolides, but they interact at the 16S subunit, not the 30S or 50S subunits.

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MathStudio is a different kind of calculator, that's for sure. As a student, I would have had a lot of applications for this. As an old ronin, it's a diversion. I could use something like this for data analytics, though. Anyone know of anything like it?

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Meta dropped Llama 4 over the weekend, and I, too, got excited. But it's not on Ollama.ai yet, and I haven't gotten around to getting it from Huggingface. Seems like it's more like Llama 3.4 than a 4.0. The reaction has been "meh". The models are large, though, but apparently they haven't been trained that thoroughly.

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China has a lot of datacenters that were built in anticipation of a high AI demand, but that feel through. Don't blame DeepSeek, though. There's still room for a lot of research and growth. You think NVIDIA is saying that all the works has been done?  Heck no. China could rent out all that metal for geek hobbyists in the world, but who trusts Chinese datacenters to run or host your stuff? No one, that's for sure. Only the Chinese would trust the Chinese.

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Must see. I think Kevin O'Leary has the right perspective on tariffs. The reporter typifies people who like to rev up the panic for the views. You have to have someone who knows how to play a longer game, because that's how you change the world. The tariff's have certainly gotten people's attention, and that's the first step.

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There's Portland, ready to raise taxes on businesses again to fill those recurring "budget gaps".  And Portland's non-profits don't have enough money to provide free legal assistance to illegal aliens, now that federal money isn't coming in.

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